Sartre: The Passions Of A Thinking Man

June 07, 1987|By Reviewed by Beverly Fields, A former professor of French literature who has also written on the subject.

Sartre: A Life

By Annie Cohen-Solal

Translated from the French by Anna Cancogni

Pantheon, 608 pages, $24.95

Sartre: A Life

By Ronald Hayman

Simon and Schuster, 572 pages, $22.95

The simultaneous appearance of two biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre with the same title is difficult to explain, particularly since the work of Annie Cohen-Solal was published in 1985, in French, as ``Sartre: 1905-1980,`` a title scarcely in need of translation, and Hayman`s British edition appeared as ``Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre.``

Easier to explain is the commercial success of the French biography: Its spirit is popular. Impressionistic in style, it is concerned more with details of the life than with analysis of the work, and is informed by such privileged sources as family archives and innumerable conversations.

The task of writing the life of Sartre is formidable. Seven years after his death, his influence lives on in an astonishing range of literature and literary theory, positions toward ways of knowing, psychoanalytic theory and practice, political theory and action, and in an immeasurable array of day-to- day gestures of thought, speech and general behavior. As Ronald Hayman points out in his exemplary biography, ``Particles of Sartre are in the blood that flows through our brains.``

But Hayman rarely indulges in even this degree of lyricism. His narrative is certainly judicious. Having written lives of Nietzsche, Kafka and Brecht, Hayman is a match for the powerful figure he is up against here. He has turned out an orderly, objective and analytical study, tough enough to present the grittiness, flexible enough to follow the turns and returns, paradoxes and ambiguities in Sartre`s search for authenticity in thought and action.

His lifelong engagement with the existentialist idea that one creates one`s essence through a free choice of actions was part of a complex of impulses that drove him as he worked at his writing. Whatever impulses drove him, he worked at his writing literally as if his life depended on it. Tirelessly, until extreme incapacity overcame him late in life, he produced

--in addition to lectures and radio and television talks--14 plays, a volume of short stories, five novels, a number of critical, psychological and philosophical works (including the enormous if indigestible ``Being and Nothingness``), biographies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, three screenplays, an autobiography and numerous letters.

In addition, Sartre`s long years of editing Les Temp Modernes (named for Chaplin`s ``Modern Times``), a journal of literature and political thought, expressed his concept of the writer engage, committed to a political position and political action. But although he fought consistently for leftist causes, his attitudes toward Marxism, Maoism, the French Communist Party and the USSR were far from consistent. His shifting positions reflected a persistent

need to tailor his own ethic rather than accept one ready-made.

It may seem that Sartre was fully occupied by politics and intellection, but he did have time for friends and lovers. His relationship with Simone de Beauvoir lasted his lifetime, though the terms of the ``contract`` they entered left each free for other relationships. Beauvoir`s affair with Nelson Algren, detailed in her ``L`Amerique au Jour le Jour`` and fictionalized in

``The Mandarins,`` is probably well-enough known. The number of women Sartre was involved with and his legal adoption of one of them in 1965, leaving Beauvoir disinherited, may be less well-known.

Of his friends, Albert Camus may be the most familiar to American readers. The depth of feeling between Sartre and Camus, and the break in their friendship, ostensibly occasioned by disagreement over Soviet labor camps, are examined by both Hayman and Cohen-Solal, but the fictional account in Beauvoir`s ``The Mandarins`` remains paradoxically the most persuasive.

Both these biographies provide keys to the interlocking novels of Sartre and Beauvoir; both may be read to find out who, for instance, is the model for Mathieu in Sartre`s series ``The Roads to Freedom,`` or what real-life triangle lies beneath Beauvoir`s ``She Came to Stay.`` But there are substantial differences between the two works.

Part of the trouble with Cohen-Solal`s biography lies with the awkward and sometimes unidiomatic translation but the real problem, aside from its analytical deficiencies, is the mannered and self-conscious style, shifting from past to present tense evidently in a misguided effort to produce a sense of immediacy, and offering speculations in the form of questions as melodramatic as soap-opera sign-offs.

Ronald Hayman`s biography will be one for serious readers of Sartre to turn to. Well written and clearly organized, it presents Sartre`s life in the social and political contexts of his time and meets the hard challenge of his written work with painstaking analysis. Among its virtues are a thorough bibliography in French and English, a chronology and an index. Cohen-Solal`s book may have appeared in France at an awkward stage of Hayman`s manuscript;